The gigantic inflatable cartoon characters of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade are perfectly at home in today’s sanitized, candy-colored Times Square. So while it’s fun to see Snoopy glide slowly past the M&M’s World, it doesn’t exactly feel like a novelty. Which is precisely what’s so great about these scenes of floats being pulled through the black-and-white New York City of yore. In each, there’s some strange admixture of everyday levity and historical gravity. It’s like seeing Fiorello La Guardia do jumping jacks.

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade started in 1924, though then it was called the Christmas Parade. In its earliest years, entertainment came in the form of animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. The first float, Felix the Cat, appeared three years later in 1927. At that point, after the parade was done, officials would just release the tethers and let the balloons float away; there was a $100 prize awarded to anyone who could find and return one to Macy’s. That event was discontinued in 1933 after a guy crashed his plane trying to secure a runaway balloon.

This dachshund was a staple in early years. Image: Macy’s Inc.

In its earliest years, entertainment came from animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo.

By 1937, there were already over 20 floats in the parade, including popular characters like Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio. A huge Uncle Sam balloon made his debut in 1938. In 1939, the year Wizard of Oz came out in theaters, a huge Tin-Man floated through the streets of Manhattan, proving that extravagant Hollywood cross-promotion is not a recent phenomenon. In all the years of the parade, there’s only been one balloon modeled after a live person: Eddie Cantor, a radio star and actor, whose likeness floated through the streets in 1940.

The parade was suspended from 1942 until 1944, as the war effort led to a shortage of helium and rubber. By 1946, the parade drew a crowd of 2 million. The next year, in 1947, was the first time the parade was televised nationally. Snoopy made his first appearance in 1968. This year’s parade will see a new Snoopy balloon–his seventh dirigible incarnation.

It’s interesting to consider how the earliest years of the parade coincided with the waning days of the Golden Age of airships. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, included a mast for docking dirigibles, and there was a full decade between the introduction of Felix the Cat, in 1927, and the explosion of the Hindenburg just 70 miles away at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, in 1937. That event irrevocably shook the world’s confidence in travel by balloon. By then, however, the sight of the things barreling down Broadway in the form of the famous characters of the day was already a New York tradition.